Good Week For Aurora Spotters

The coming of the dark nights heralds the end of summer, but it’s also the time that the flickering aurora becomes visible in the sky over Iceland. Last night, on the night of the equinox, there was a big display of northern lights visible from all over Reykjavík. It was mostly green, with pink tinges around the edges, and kept up continually for several hours, from thin, dancing streaks in the west, to a fat band of bright pink-tinged green light going right across the sky.

I got a notification from the Northern Lights Alert Facebook group and ran out to catch the following (admittedly quite shitty) iPhone pictures from my backyard. It’s a handy group, except when people give a false alarm by posting “thanks for the add!” messages. So like. Don’t do that, yo.

If you’re here for a short time and wanna go chasing the lights, this forecast is a resource that shows the projected intensity of the aurora on an hour-by-hour basis, alongside a map of estimated cloud cover. So you could get away from the downtown lights and go racing off into the countryside in search of that cosmic experience/Instagram photo you’ve been craving.